David, please tell me you weren't part of this...

[Giles Orr]

It seems to me that the original argument against this event revolved
around the discussion of vandalism on the Ubuntu mailing list.  This
didn't occur, so I'm not sure I see why this remains a big issue.  Was
the event successful?  They handed out a lot of CDs by the sound of
it, and personally I think this is a good thing: the distinction
between people voluntarily taking CDs and receiving AOL-like mass
mailings is a pretty big one.  And they talked to people - that's
always good.  Is this the "right" method?  It wasn't perfect, but they
went out and showed a hell of a lot of enthusiasm, and that's a good
thing.

As for the Debian-Ubuntu debate ... I'm also an Ubuntu user.  I used
Debian for a couple years, and continue to use it on a couple other
systems.  They're both excellent.  Ubuntu puts a user-friendly face on
an occasionally difficult-to-use but very good distro.  Debian is
upset that Ubuntu has hijacked all their hard work.  But the work of
both is under the GPL, anyone can borrow their work wholesale.  It's
something you need to accept when you sign on to the GPL.  Someone may
yet "hijack" Ubuntu - including Debian, who could look at borrowing
any of the good stuff Ubuntu has done if they weren't so spitting mad
at them in the first place.

Every community has fringe members who make wild suggestions and
occasionally do stupid things.  From an initial bad idea, someone got
out there and talked to a bunch of Windows users about Linux, and even
gave them a way to install it.  Let's call this a win.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists